LONG BEACH – The Long Beach State men’s basketball team got a helping hand from its Cal Poly counterpart Saturday in order to clinch a share of the Big West Conference regular-season championship.

But it will be all on the 49ers tonight to win the thing outright when they visit Stockton for a 9 o’clock game with the University of Pacific Tigers.

With a national television audience looking on (or whatever kind of viewing crowd ESPN2 can muster), the 49ers will take 19-7 overall and 9-2 conference records into the Spanos Center against a UOP team that is 11-15 and 5-6 after its 76-73 loss at Cal State Northridge on Saturday.

If the 49ers win in Stockton for the first time in five years, they’ll return to Southern California on Tuesday morning with the BWC title all to themselves for the first time since 1996.

“We want to get it done as soon as possible,” Aaron Nixon said, after scoring 27 points in only 28 minutes during Long Beach’s 102-77 nonconference victory over UC Davis on Saturday in the Walter Pyramid.

“There is a lot riding (on the game). We’re playing on national TV, we want to wrap up the league and we want to take a (winning) streak into the (conference) tournament.”

Long Beach was guaranteed no worse than a co-championship (with three games to play) when Cal Poly beat host Cal State Fullerton on Saturday, 90-80.

The 49ers had little difficulty while beating the Tigers (92-64) when the teams met in Long Beach on Feb. 3.

Long Beach coaches threw a bit of a surprise at UOP, pressing the Tigers full court and then falling into a 1-3-1 zone in half court (instead of their usual man-to-man). The move kept the Tigers from getting the ball inside to post players Anthony Brown (14.5 points per game) and Michael White (8.9 ppg) as frequently and in as good of position as coach Bob Thomason would have preferred.

And UOP’s perimeter players didn’t do much in the way of responding with jump shots while hitting just 7 of 23 shots behind the arc.

Long Beach coach Larry Reynolds expects the Tigers to be much better prepared for that defensive approach this time around – assuming the 49ers employ it.

“They’ve got a great coaching staff and I’m sure they’ll make adjustments,” he said of Thomason and his assistants. “So it will be up to us to make adjustments to their adjustments.

“And I’m sure we’ll see a different UOP than the one we played here (in the Walter Pyramid).”

The 49ers play their final home game on Thursday night against UC Irvine, then wrap up the regular season Saturday evening at UC Riverside.

The Big West Tournament gets under way on March 7 in the Anaheim Convention Center. But the 49ers have clinched a bye until the March 9 semifinals.